DJ Savarese is a public speaker, writer, and activist who works to make literacy-based education, communication, and inclusive lives a reality for all nontraditionally speaking people through artful advocacy, teaching, and community organizing. A 2017-19 OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow alum, he is also the co-producer of the Peabody award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t be a Lottery, which unearths discrepancies between insider and outsider perspectives of his lived experience as an alternatively-communicating autistic person. DJ is the author of the chapbook A Doorknob for the Eye and has published poems and prose in The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Prospect, Bellingham Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Autism in Adulthood, Stone Canoe, and wordgathering.com. “Passive Plants,” a lyric essay published in The Iowa Review, was named a notable essay in the 2018 Best American Essays. Before moving to Iowa City, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College in May 2017 with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing. A complete list of his presentations is available here on his CV.